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smc

algebra senior

Problem

Arithmetic sequences and have integer terms with and for some . What is the largest possible value of ?
(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
Solution
Since and have integer terms with , we can write the terms of each sequence as where and () are the common differences of each, respectively. Since it is easy to see that . Hence, we have to find the largest such that and are both integers; equivalently, we want to maximize . The prime factorization of is . We list out all the possible pairs that have a product of , noting that these are the possible values of and we need : and soon find that the largest value is for the pair , and so the largest value is .
Final answer
C